Tuesday, August 25, 2015

The End of All Hugos to Come: Of Clubhouses and the Young Devouring the Old

Here's the background for those unaware. Concerned about a political bias in the awards and dissatisfied with the quality of recent nominees, a group of right-wing authors started a campaign, #SadPuppies, to get work they and their fans liked on the ballot (there was also a related, more radical campaign – #RabidPuppies). Their campaign was a little too successful and their nominees flooded the ballots, locking up all five slots in some categories. This riled up the rest of Fandom, resulting in a lot of ugliness and bad feeling, and culminated in an award ceremony on Saturday that saw five categories No Awarded as a protest against the slate-voting tactics of the Puppies/because none of the nominees were of sufficient quality/because of the politics of the nominees (*insert own truth).

This is just the barebones. There's plenty more elsewhere on the internet if you want to read up more. As with all political controversies, most of what's written is heavily slanted to one side or the other, so I'd recommend reading from sources on both sides of the fracture to get the full picture. I'd also recommend avoiding reading anything from mainstream media sources such as The Guardian. Over the past couple of years mainstream media has either been utterly inept or wilfully duplicitous in their reporting on flare-ups in online nerd/geek spaces and this is sadly more of the same. The argument that this is a conspiracy by old racist, misogynist white dudes to keep minorities and women out of Sci-Fi doesn't really hold up under closer inspection (the number of women on their ballots and the fact that one of the "racist" Sad Puppies organisers, Brad Torgersen, has been happily married to a black woman for over two decades are fairly big giveaways).

For me personally I don't have a dog in this fight. I write succubus porn for a tiny niche audience and have the networking skills of an octoplegic arachnid. The probability of my work being noticed and put forward for an award like the Hugo is somewhere about the same as the Earth spontaneously imploding.

It doesn't affect me much as a reader either. My reading preferences lean more towards horror than either science fiction or fantasy, and awards have been functionally useless in suggesting books I'd want to read for some time now.

While the stated aims of the Sad Puppies are laudable, replacing one clique with another—and unfortunately that's how it looks to an outside eye once you unpick the spiderwebs of who's connected to who—doesn't feel like significant improvement to either writer-me or reader-me. All this latest dust-up has achieved is to reinforce my impression that the whole of SFF (capital-F) Fandom is nuts, probably hazardous-to-career/productivity and best viewed from afar with a strong telescope.

What I find interesting is how the whole Hugo Awards controversy is playing out as an extension of the wider Libertarian vs. Authoritarian culture war currently waging in online nerd communities. #GamerGate has been raging for a year now, an unprecedented amount of time in the age of social media. #GamerGate should have been a trivial bit of kerfuffle about a minor figure in the indie dev scene that blew over in a week, but then virtually all of the online gaming press decided to declare war on their own audience and, twelve months later, a good chunk of that audience is still raging. At this point I don't think #GamerGate is ever going away. It's gone beyond a protest movement/hate group (*insert own truth) and coalesced into a community... a very angry community furious about how they've been demonised by the media.

How does this relate to the Hugos? One of the accusations levelled at the Puppies is that they dragged those evil GamerGaters into the nomination process. As with most of the racist/misogynist/homophobic claims, it doesn't hold up under closer inspection. One of the regular tweeters for #GamerGate, @Daddy_Warpig, is a fan of some of the Puppy writers and #RabidPuppies ringleader Vox Day identifies as a #GamerGate supporter, but that's about it. Or at least, was about it. Plenty of #GamerGaters kept a close eye on the awards and they did not like what they saw.

Still, who gives a fuck about #GamerGate? They're just the same old bunch of whiny white dudes crying because someone let some women and minorities into their clubhouse to play with their toys... right? And there's only like a handful of them anyway... right?

That seems to be the usual narrative about #GamerGate and every other online controversy where geeks and nerds get angry on the internet. They're old white male dinosaurs—reactionary relics lashing out a world moving away from them. That world is moving to a bright, shiny future filled with inclusivity and diversity, and nerd culture—be it games, comics, films, books—would be there already if these inconvenient old straight white male neckbeards would just shift their inconvenient fat carcasses out of the way and jump in the nearest canal. That seems to be the message from a cultural media elite with their blogs and opinion columns—"We are the future, you are the past. Your extinction is at hand, now kindly accept it and fuck off."

One thing that struck me about the aftermath of the Hugo Awards on social media was that the people most mad about the No Awarding didn't strike me as these old dinosaurs raging at their usurpation. They sounded young.

Young. Disenfranchised. Angry.

And this is #GamerGate in a nutshell. It's not about excluding women, it's not even about ethics in games journalism. It's anger. And most of this anger is directed at an elite media class that doesn't understand them and has repeatedly lied about and demonised them. If they're white and male, they're angry at being lectured to about privilege by writers with far greater reach and social capital. If they're female or a minority, they're angry at being dismissed as sock puppets, or of having "internalized misogyny". They're angry at being called misogynists, racists and homophobes for questioning logic in media narratives that don't add up to them. They're angry at being smeared as terrorists and rapists for having the temerity of speaking back.

One of the things I found most telling was a twitter exchange between one of these angry young nerds and a multi-award-winning author. The author described it as Fandom successfully keeping out interlopers trying to gate-crash the clubhouse. And then it clicked for me. The roles are all wrong. The angry young nerd isn't angry because they think they're being kicked out of the clubhouse to let in a more diverse female/PoC/LGBT crowd. They've never even been inside the clubhouse.

I don't think the people that write the blogs and newspaper articles understand this. They've made careers and names out of "punching up" and "speaking truth to power". I don't think they recognise that to the young people coming up, they've become the establishment putting bars on the doors and windows of the clubhouse.

Now we come back to #SadPuppies and the Hugo Awards. My personal opinion is that while I'm sympathetic to the #SadPuppies cause, ending up with a situation where the rest of the voters were left with a choice of voting for one of the Puppy picks or none at all was a mistake (and not entirely the #SadPuppies fault—it was the additions of Vox Day's overlapping #RabidPuppies slate that ended up locking out some of the categories). People being the contrary buggers they are, voters going "fuck you" and plumping for none at all was always a likely outcome in that scenario.

The thing is, all those angry young nerds currently raging on the internet aren't going to see that. These people have zero trust in the media after fighting a bruising campaign against it over the past year. They've even been blamed for contributing to this controversy and casually smeared, again.

This has been reported as a victory for progressive attitudes over a reactionary backlash of old white dudes stuck in the past, further evidence that the old guard are being elbowed aside and the future of SFF is a bright one with social justice at its heart. I think there's a problem here. It relies on the assumption that the current backlash is coming from old dinosaurs clinging grimly on to power. They're thinning out. Less and less people are sharing their attitudes. Soon they'll be gone and the cultural shift will be complete.

Except there's a good chance that all the folks raging in twitter and reddit posts are younger than the more connected folk writing all the nice blogposts about SFF's bright and rainbow-coloured future. Which would mean what we're seeing now is not a reactionary backlash from a generation on the way out, but a backlash against perceived authoritarianism from a generation on the way in. They're really angry at the current media class. Their numbers are growing and they're getting angrier. They will also bring a cultural shift, but it might not be the one you're expecting and it might not be pleasant.

That's the thing about being the future, you always end up being someone else's past.

The young replace the old.

Currently the young are very angry. Then someone like Vox Day comes along. Vox is an asshole. He doesn't pretend to be anything else. Most of these angry young nerds are not assholes. They don't even like Vox. A cursory glance at #GamerGate HQ, the KotakuInAction subreddit, shows this. Every time his name comes up it's usually followed by, "Ugh, that guy," or words to the same effect. But the thing is, if you're caught between two sides and one side is throwing rocks at your head, it's human nature to gravitate to the side not currently throwing rocks at your head.

I find it ironic that in the same year Mixon received a Hugo for her exposé of Requires Hate, Fandom seems wilfully unaware that people are still using the same hacks to spread toxicity from behind a shield of supposed social justice. This is great for Vox Day. Whenever one of Team "Social Justice" posts another of their venomous screeds about young white men being the most useless and deficient individuals in society, the Dark Lord of Evil rubs his hands and welcomes more Vile Faceless Minions to the fold.

It's why Vox's "SJWs Always Lie" sticks. They keep proving him right ALL THE GODDAMN TIME. This resonates with the young angry nerds—they've seen mainstream media lie about them constantly for the past year. They look at #SadPuppies and recognise the same smears and hit pieces.

It's no surprise right-wing outlets such as Breitbart.com are taking an interest in these young angry nerds. For the first time in half a century the Right sees an opportunity to not be the stop-having-fun side of politics amongst the young. Because this is the young—the next generation coming through. They're going to be the people writing about SFF and Fandom in the future. Do you really want to leave them to be shaped by people like Vox Day?

24 comments:

Now that that's out of the way... honestly, the thing that really kills the SJW crowd is the rampant hipocrisy. They will condemn their opponents up and down for their strawmanning, their false parallels, their exclusionary and racist behavior (and to be fair, they're often right on the money. fuck vox day.), and then, in a stunning display of absolute cluelessness, TURN AROUND AND ACT THE EXACT SAME WAY. It's extremely frustrating. Point for point I basically agree with the entire platform of social justice, and there's only a handful of their self-proclaimed spokespeople that I don't want to see beaten with hoses. For what it's worth, a think a lot of the old guard there feel that way too. the more sane parts of the social justice/etc communities are shedding people like crazy.

The strawmanning, false equivalencies, and various othering claims are all just ways of looking at someone and going 'I don't have to address the flaws in my position because reasons. It's all your fault, really.' And then they engage in increasingly contorted self-justification for why they aren't doing the same thing as their opponents. If you're trying to claim the moral high ground over someone because of their disgusting and amoral tactics and behavior, you should start by not adapting those same tactics for your own and smearing anyone who points that out. It's... not that hard. Unless you're a jackass that wants to feel smug about something.

It's not the 'SJ' in SJW that's the problem for most people. It's the 'W'. And the original meaning was meant to be ironic - as in SJWs were only interested in using the SJ as a pretext to attack and bully other individuals. That's one thing I found exasperating. In the same year Mixon was given a Hugo for exposing one of the worst no-one seemed to realise one of the Puppy grievances is that they've had to put up with the same thing for years. That's why this 'no bad tactics, only bad targets' makes me sick. It gives very abhorrent people a license to get away with abhorrent behaviour so long as they do the groundwork to get their target smeared with the right tag beforehand.

And the worst part is it's not even that hard, if you're willing to play the guilt by association card. there's always someone you know who knows someone else that's a shitstain, and how can you stand to associate with someone you know!?! Don't you know they talk to and are therefore exactly like someone else!?!

As soon as you reply with the standard 'the fuck?' response, they set the hook and anything you say is twisted around to suit their position.

This was written by Liz Finnegan. She was active in #GamerGate at the start as @Lizzyf620 (and was viciously harassed for it if I remember correctly) and went on to have regular columns on The Escapist and Everyjoe.

In five years or so the other side of GamerGate will come out. The people in the middle of it are there because they're passionate about games. In a few years they will be the media reporting on games and they will remember how the old media treated them.

The thing is if you look at Kotakuinaction, 8chan, or puppy discussion threads you'll see that they are overwhelmingly middle to far left. They know the right is just being opportunistic.

One of the common things gamergaters will point out is that they know as soon as SJWs are dealt with the right wingers will turn right back around to saying videogames are the devil again.

But right now the right is a fringe. SJWs utterly dominate social and legal institutions to such a degree that they have massive influence on government policy, laws, institutional policies, the works.

Yep, it's what I've noticed as well. It keeps being reported as a left vs. right issue when it looks more like a libertarian vs. authoritarian issue. I think elements of the left had problems grokking it because for most of the time left=liberal and not-left=illiberal. Breitbart might have a bad rep, but I think Allum Bokhari is doing some interesting work there on this.

Personally I fall somewhere in the centre of the left-right axis and on the libertarian side of the libertarian vs. authoritarian axis. I hate tribal politics.

"The thing is if you look at Kotakuinaction, 8chan, or puppy discussion threads you'll see that they are overwhelmingly middle to far left."

Really? I would disagree. When I look at them, I see right-wingers like Vox and Wright, some neo-reactionaries in the vein of Moldbug, and a bunch of anarcho-capitalist/Randian libertarians. For all their claims of "leftism", they don't seem terribly left to me. Maybe our American version of "left", which is anything but. Of course, that's opinion for you.

Haha. When I saw how little votes were needed to make it onto the final ballot (seriously, the top non-puppy selection had only 76 votes in short story: http://www.thehugoawards.org/content/pdf/2015HugoStatistics.pdf) the evil little devil in me did have an idea - write a GG-themed short story, ram in as much squicky porn as possible and the see if I could get GG behind it to nominate it for the lulz.

Thankfully I'm not Vox Day and I failed my asshole roll on that one. Plus, I'm thick-skinned, but I'm not that thick-skinned! I saw what they did to Torgersen this year.

Nah. Save your money and support creators writing work you enjoy rather than shovelling membership money to a clubhouse that's made it clear they don't want you.

(I'll probably still write that story though. Airport's Law is just to good not to do something with. Maybe have the Goony Beard Man gobbled up by a gelatinous monster girl. :) )

True. The attacks will be vicious. But if Puppies want to continue they will need someone that won't withdraw their nomination for fear of backlash. This is what this year's asterisk awards were all about: make authors reluctant to appear on Puppy slate.

As for saving the money... Yeah... It's fairly unlikely #GamerGate would be willing to spend $40 just to nominate something that will get no-awarded anyway. You can get 2 games for that during a Steam sale.

PS. If you do write the story then you could try to ask @kukuruyo for an illustration, the dude loves drawing monster girls.

Oh, if people were crazy enough to go forward with this, I wouldn't back out. That's not fair once people have put money down. And as vicious as they are, there's not a lot the hardcore SJW crowd can do to actually damage me.

Feels like it would be an expensive stunt though. More people are going to be motivated to vote next year, so the thresholds are going to be higher - 200-400 in short story?

I like kukuruyo's monster girl art. He hangs out in one of the same online communities I do, although we haven't interacted much. I think he's buried under commissions at the moment though.

"They're old white male dinosaurs—reactionary relics lashing out a world moving away from them"

I can't speak about any but the chans and KiA on Reddit, but the majority of the GamerGate supporters seen tend to trend:- Caucasian- Male- 18-25- Libertarian- Middle-to-lower class background

"Young. Disenfranchised. Angry."

I would say they are all three, yes. They are angry, they are disenfranchised, and they are young. As they get older, perhaps they will see why the middle part happened.

"And most of this anger is directed at an elite media class that doesn't understand them and has repeatedly lied about and demonised them."

I would disagree with this. I think the elite understand them all too well.

"The angry young nerd isn't angry because they think they're being kicked out of the clubhouse to let in a more diverse female/PoC/LGBT crowd. They've never even been inside the clubhouse."

I absolutely agree. These young angry geeks have never been in the clubhouse. They would have been a shoo-in 20 years ago, but now that the pool of applicants has widened, they no longer make the grade. This will absolutely make them angry.

"I don't think they recognise that to the young people coming up, they've become the establishment putting bars on the doors and windows of the clubhouse."

Probably about half do not realize this, yes.

"Which would mean what we're seeing now is not a reactionary backlash from a generation on the way out, but a backlash against perceived authoritarianism from a generation on the way in. They're really angry at the current media class. Their numbers are growing and they're getting angrier. They will also bring a cultural shift, but it might not be the one you're expecting and it might not be pleasant."

This assumes one thing: that the young and angry libertarian bunch are the majority. Frankly, that is NOT what I see. They are very loud, to be certain, and they are very good at dominating internet discourse...but in real life, in public? No bueno. They're outnumbered by the people NOT arguing with them on the internet.

It's rather like conservative evangelist Americans on the internet who insist there is a "silent majority" of 70-80 million evangelists who do not vote at all - but will if someone conservative enough is nominated. That "silent majority" does not exist.

In the same way, I often see Gaters - I will use this term as a nebulous overarching term for sake of convenience - claim they are also the majority, silent or otherwise. I have never seen this borne out in person, at either Gater events or general fan events. There are plenty of them in Atlanta, GA and the surrounding areas to choose from. In any event that I have seen in the flesh, their numbers are small in comparison to those opposing them.

"Then someone like Vox Day comes along. Vox is an asshole."

And insane, like his father. We must not forget that. Vox believes in everything he says, even if people like to pretend otherwise. So did his father.

"It's no surprise right-wing outlets such as Breitbart.com are taking an interest in these young angry nerds."

Of course. Angry young libertarians have ALWAYS been food for the populists. I should know; 20 years ago I was one.

Personally, I cannot side with libertarianism. I tried it. It doesn't work. All promotion I and others did of libertarian ideals led to the current economic and political situation we have today. Screw how you make your money; making money by any means necessary is legit. Poors are poor because they are inferior failures. Randian rugged individualism is the way to go. If you're not totally loyal to the corporation, you're a socialist communist - and you're disposable anyway.

Libertarianism is 'Fuck you, I've got mine.' dressed up in fine clothes. All the libertarians I've met over the years have fallen into three categories. Power-hungry sociopaths, young populists deeply confused about what libertarianism really entails aside from minimizing government dickery, and people slowly becoming disillusioned with the first group.

Thanks for the other perspective A.R.M.S. It's hard to gauge the mood on these things. They're a bit like icebergs - we only see the loud shouty bits above the surface.

It's hard to know how things will pan out. I've seen some things that seem like indicators, but I'm not going to pretend I'm immune to confirmation bias.

This became interesting to me in the context of how the last UK elections played out. The left-wing media were all shocked by the result, largely because they'd fallen into their own bubble and dismissed all dissenting voices as [X]ist trolls.

The pups were probably guilty of the same thing on the other side (apart from Vox, who knew he was playing a different game from the start).

Just my two cents on Gamergate (I know nothing about the Hugo Awards):

- The whole thing is incredibly tedious and every time I read it I just go off that video game thing altogether and reassess what I'm doing with my life.

- I know I hate the SJW mob but I have to be honest - I can't see what the actual beef Gamergate has is.As far as I can tell, the original insinuation is that a games developer slept with a videogames journalist, allegedly to get good reviews.But then other stories say that the guy in question never ended up reviewing her game anyway.Other sources say it's a wider debate about ethics in gaming. Okay then, but what exactly? Give me practices, incidents which have annoyed you. And that can't include Gamergate coverage (however unjustified that coverage is) because that's clearly not what originally made Gamergaters angry.This is the age of the internet - you'd think that by now a solid page listing exact practices that are examples of unnacceptable ethics in games journalism would have risen to the top as the 'go-to' page for everything that's wrong with the modern gaming press/developers relationship.

- The gaming press: hoo boy.MEH, you summed it up best with the analogy of Gerald Ratner. The articles that told us all that the 'gamer' is dead actually had a fair point to make: video gaming is made up of a much more diverse audience now as its mediums and genre open up further and further.But if you craft it in the message of: "Hey, guess what readership? Your time is done." then you really don't deserve your ad bucks.Maybe craft it along the lines of: "What does being a gamer in 2015 mean?" or "Why we are all gamers now" if you want to capture the pervasiveness of mobile gaming.Hey, maybe even engage with your audience, ask the hardcore CODers and Starcraft people if they've noticed gaming habits in their own family change.Not "LOL fuck you basement dwellers who actually read our content"

- The whole SJW versus misogynist Gamergaters: This is the worst part and sums it all up.An argument over something I can't for the life of me point to a coherent origin for descending into a catfight between the most PC of journalists and the most abhorrent minority of the other side. It's watching a minority of an argument getting slated by the establishment over something that was never that present to begin with.

- SJW issues and misogyny: Okay so ever since I was about 13 and I touched Dead or Alive on PS2, I remember myself thinking: "Okay so this is fun but Jesus I sure wouldn't want to be caught playing this by anyone I respect"I'm still of the same opinion, especially in light of the game dev saying he liked the thought of people jacking it over girls in one of the later games.I think actually it would be a good thing to see more realistic female characters in gaming and we are heading in the right direction. (The Tomb Raider reboot was a crude step but hey, at least her tits aren't the size of footballs any more.)I know if I was a girl I wouldn't like the thought of seeing most of my sex represented in games by top-heavy starlets who are there to pose and jiggle as much, if not more, then they are to kick butt.Where I differ from the SJW press is that with all the millions in video gaming, surely there is room for both?Surely, we can have realistic Lara continue to exist in the same universe as Mr DOA dev wondering how many people are beating it to Kasumi?NO. Says the SJW. Making titillating characters is an insult to women everywhere and we must continue to constantly address this issue in every game we come across.My solution would just be to stick it in the review - no need to dwell on it but just say what most of us think. Imagine reviewing Ninja Gaiden for the first time and in the pros/cons bits sticking a bit in the cons: "Female ninja looks utterly ridiculous and is a bit embarrassing you guys"

Also, the other thing wrong with the modern gaming press - this prick:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD0_DfvutM4

"This is the age of the internet - you'd think that by now a solid page listing exact practices that are examples of unnacceptable ethics in games journalism would have risen to the top as the 'go-to' page for everything that's wrong with the modern gaming press/developers relationship."

Funny you should say that :)

http://www.deepfreeze.it/(YMMV on how serious/trivial some of the ethical breaches are)

I'm in agreement with you on the second part. I think it's the difference between the 'SJ' and 'SJW' again. Add the W and they don't seem interested in co-existing or room for both - it's all about finding pretexts to destroy or tear down things they don't like. I don't agree with policing fantasy. Add more, don't subtract is my thoughts on this.